December 2010

December 17, 2010

I volunteered to do some baking for a dessert auction fundraiser for my eight-year-old’s school. Never mind the ill omens that have attended all my holiday baking projects this year. Yes, the elaborate stained glass ornament cookies turned, within hours, into a substance NASA could use to adhere the heat tiles to the Space Shuttle. True, my attempt at Florentines yielded a batch of uncaramelized, lumpy globs that tasted fine but looked like that fake barf you can get in novelty shops. The gingerbread men looked like homeless drunks, the Moravian spice cookies disintegrated, and the gingerbread house drew legions of ants.

Nevertheless, when given the donation form for the fundraiser, I promptly signed myself up for two high-difficulty-level desserts I have never attempted before. Yep – where the other moms offer up their go-to brownies and lemon bars and cookies with M&Ms in them, Amy puts her hat in the ring for a croquembouche (above) and a chevre cheesecake with poached pears.

Does anyone have some extra Ritalin? I can trade you for creampuffs.

I’ve been thinking about this good and hard. Why do I always set myself up like that? In the end, will anyone care how hard I slaved over my donation? Am I a victim of some pathological drive to impress people? What, in short, is my major damage?

It didn’t take long for the thinking to leak into a contemplation of the writing process and to see this line of inquiry as allied with the others upon which, with your kind indulgence, I’ve been allowed to cogitate this week.

To wit: as writers, we are engaged in an interesting little investigation of identity, are we not? Writing is, at once, a deeply private and utterly public act. We reveal ourselves in what we obfuscate as well as what we reveal; in the things we choose to say and the manner of our saying them; in the words we choose and the way we arrange them; in genre, in form, in diction, in syntax, in character, in line break, in every single choice we make.

I am an unreconstructed, unapologetic lover of formalism. The writers who thrill me the most are usually lapidary wordsmiths (Nabokov, Rushdie, Borges; W.B. Yeats, James Merrill, Richard Kenney). I love all kinds of good writing and don’t confine myself to one style or school, but shown a poem with cool ideas and a poem with cool ideas presented as a hopelessly intricate Faberge egg, I won’t lie to you about which one will win my heart most of the time.

Mastery is a terribly tricky thing. First, it’s all but mythical, illusory – an impossible moving target. Second, it’s easy to make the mistake of conflating mastery with perfection, and I suspect that perfection can be absolutely lethal to art. Some of the most boring music I’ve ever heard features singers with perfect voices. Perfectly rendered verses can have the same problem – they’re static, unsatisfying.

But mastery isn’t about perfection. Mastery is about intimate understanding, about depth perception. It’s flexible, dynamic, energetic. It’s about knowing which way to turn in the quest for perfection and accepting you’ll never fully arrive there. And it involves, de facto, effort, sustained practice, and a continuous willingness to raise the bar. You can master the chocolate chip cookie and never feel the slightest urge to take a crack at the croquembouche – and so what? Who wouldn’t rather have a sublime chocolate chip cookie than a crappy creampuff? A beautifully executed simple thing has no less value than a beautifully executed complicated thing, and arguably more value than a complicated thing executed poorly, which I, for one, may discover I am about to deliver to this fundraiser (not to mention any number of journal editors). So there is also a question of why we develop the urge to master the particular things we do. What is in the psyche of a pyrotechnician like Nabokov or Merrill versus a submerged iceberg like, say, Hemingway (also indisputably a master, and also a hero of mine)? And why are some people inclined to dismiss ornate, complicated writing as overly-cerebral frippery and some, like me, thrilled to the marrow by it?

Oh – did you think I was going to propose an answer to that? Sorry; no dice. I don’t know. But I guess I might posit that each of us writes from, among many other impulses, a desire to impose order on the chaos of the universe, and that for some of us, the more intricate and elaborate the display or order, the safer we feel. Safe? Maybe not safe. But there is comfort in the idea of underlying design. And more: the more elaborate and complex we make something, the more spectacular it can be when we jar it, mess with it, set fire to it, blow it up. Big rewards for big risks.

So clearly, I have no choice but to show up to the fundraiser with the croquembuche rather than the plate of chocolate chip cookies. And a lot of folks would rather eat the cookies – hell, at the end of the day maybe I would rather eat the cookies too. But if I do the stupid croquembouche well enough for even one person to look at it and feel dazzled, feel compelled, feel a great desire to eat that thing, feel a momentary rush of appreciation that someone went to that much effort just to delight them – it’s worth it, and if I show up with a lumpy mess that makes people feel a little sorry for it – um, it’s still worth it.

December 15, 2010

Inspiration. An etymologically rich word deriving from the Latin inspirare, to blow or breathe into or out upon. To breathe life into something; to animate with "spirit," a vital essence.

Similar to the question "Whom do you write for?" is the question "What or who inspires you?" As writers we've (hopefully!) all had the experience of being so deeply in thrall to a moment of inspiration that we seem to become vessels or channels through which something else is working. Some of us hear voices we are convinced are not our own. Some of us have visions. Some of us enter one of those deep meditative states where we rewire our brains and somehow, momentarily, tap eternity. Some of us tap into a bottle of Jaegermeister stashed in a desk drawer. Whatever it is and however we get there... don't you live for those moments? As much as the majority of what we do is on the perspiration end of the spectrum, aren't you always, always hoping for that incendiary, ecstatic spark, that bolt of lightning, that breath of air?

Rilke allegedly wrote the Duino Elegies in such a fit of inspiration; while taking a walk near Duino castle outside Trieste, he claimed to have heard a voice speaking what became the elegy's first lines:

No doubt, the angels ceased dictating shortly thereafter and left RMR to pen the rest of the work the old-fashioned way, but it's a great story, and inspires (!) me to think about the noise we live with most of the time, both inside and outside our own heads. How do you make yourself available to inspiration? How do you make yourself the best vessel, the best conduit, the best scribe?

While you're considering that, I offer you an excerpt from the second Duino Elegy. I'll refrain from comment and let it speak for itself, as it does so admirably.

Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air.For it seems that everything hides us.Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.You hold each other. Where is your proof?Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other,or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.That gives me a slight sensation.But who would dare to exist, just for that?You, though, who in the other's passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs you:"No more . . . "; you who beneath his hands swell with abundance,like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged:I am asking you about us.I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves,because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;because underneath it you feel pure duration.So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances,the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the garden:lovers, are you the same?When you lift yourselves up to each other's mouth and your lips join,drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.Weren't you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic gravestones?Wasn't love and departure placed so gently on shouldersthat it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the torsos.These self-mastered figures know: "We can go this far,this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon us.But that is the gods' affair."If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.Four our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.And we can no longer follow it,gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.

The 411: Yesterday, while on the phone with my insurance company, I typed this as my Facebook status update:

All of our representatives are assisting other callers at this time. Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be handled in the order it was received.

Soon after, Mark Doty commented that these lines would "make for a fine pantoum" so I threw down the guantlet. The response was enthusiastic so we're opening up the contest here with the beautiful Design House Stockholm "Poem Cup" as first prize.

Here's the challenge: Write either a villanelle or a pantoum using the lines in bold, above. Submit your poem by midnight on Saturday, December 18, 2010 in an e-mail to bestampo@gmail.com. We'll post the best of the submissions and one lucky poet will win the cup.

December 14, 2010

As a frequent-flier at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference I’ve heard an incredible array of craft lectures delivered by a collective embarrassment of intellectual riches. They’ve rewritten my assumptions, thrown down gauntlets, touched off inspiration, haunted me months or years after the fact. One that returns to me often is a lecture Alice McDermott gave. I remember almost none of it. But the central theme was a refrain she repeated throughout the hour (using the device of repetition as deftly as any poet could, resonance and shifted sense tumbling over one another, kaleidoscopic, expansive.)

“Whom do you write for?”

It’s a common enough question for writers, whether we’re pondering it at the marketing level (who is the audience for this piece?) or navel-gazing over the vicissitudes of the creative process (do you have an “ideal reader?” Is it a real person, or imaginary? Is your ideal reader another writer? Is it someone you know? If real, do they actually read your work or do you just write “for” them in the abstract? Do you have a consistent “first” reader and if so is it reciprocal and what do you do for each other? Etc.)

Can any of us say honestly that we write “for” ourselves? And would we be better writers if we truly did write solely for ourselves? In the quest to free oneself from undue influence it seems easy to fall into a kind of solipsistic irrelevance (myth of Narcissus, anyone?). At the same time, that quest is critical to our development, just as the self-absorbed, egocentric mindset of a teenager is a vital step toward adult individuation. You’d be foolish to think you could skip it.

Are you in a long-term relationship with your reader (whether real or abstract)? I have a wonderful novel writers’ workshop I’ve been meeting with since 2001. Supportive, critically acute (and, blessed bonus, every one of them can cook), these folks have been an indispensable source of wisdom and guidance and accolade and bullshit-calling and everything a writer needs. Yet, as we all increasingly notice, in ten years we’ve each adapted to one another’s rulebooks. We write, like it or not, for better and worse, richer and poorer, for each other, anticipating what this person will take issue with and what that one thinks a plot should be. Our group has developed shorthand, the way married couples do. We are all writing leaner, better, cleaner, as a result. We are also all just a little less interesting. Influence cuts both ways. And like parental criticism, you hear it enough times and it doesn’t matter: you’re going to do it for yourself, in your head, forever.

Does your ideal reader, your “whom,” vary with each thing you write? Is there a monolithic muse looming over your monitor, tinting the ink in your pen? Is your phantom reader a mentor, a teacher you wish to please? A great predecessor to whom you hope to pay homage? Is it an imaginary younger iteration of yourself, unwittingly pulling your book from a store shelf, not realizing his life is about to be irrevocably changed? Do you write, not for someone, but at them? Are you possessed by an unslakable need to explain something, to justify, to make amends or eke out revenge or both? Do you write for a jury? For a love interest? For a god?

I have a handful of people, some of them fellow writers, some not, who have been, consistently or sporadically the Other for whom I write, or at least, the potential reader I hold in mind as a focus object. In poetry this has often resulted in a strong epistolary impulse for me, and I’ve had to trash innumerable drafts of poems where one or two decent ideas got bogged down in something that had become a love letter with line breaks – too personal, too hermetic, too ekphrastic, too specific to my projected reader for anyone else to care. However, in some cases, and perhaps especially when one’s Reader is also a writer, there is also great potential for an ekphrastic relationship that truly transcends name-droppery and intellectual posturing. We do not write in isolation, though God knows it feels like it much of the time. Every one of us is in dialogue with the entire history of our art, and no one’s likely to amount to much if they can’t see that. When we acknowledge our debts to our ancestors, the resonance of our writing deepens. And when we seek the minds and souls of our forebears and read them with the thought that in some way they too are reading us, then we are perhaps approaching what Borges meant when he said (And thank you again, Alice McDermott, for this quote) "good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors themselves," and reading [is] "an activity subsequent to writing-more resigned, more civil, more intellectual."

And here’s a question: whom do you edit for? I’ve realized I edit for the people who intimidate me the most. I’ve got this wristband that has “WWJHD” on it (What Would John Hollander Do?) I think about people who might someday read me (note the phrase, folks) and contemplate where I might be exposing something stupid, uniformed, nebbishy, unwittingly derivative, been-there-done-that. I apply their imaginary judgments to my work, one after another, the way optometrists do with those lenses. (“Better? Or worse? Better? Or worse?) I scan drafts imagining I am looking through the eyes of this expert and that scholar, this ex-boyfriend and that second cousin, each of them exposing different layers of ineptitude, though I never catch them all.

I don’t think my way is necessarily a good way. My first experience writing a novel was a 15 year nightmare because I was so hamstrung by the people in my head whom I knew could see straight through me. My second time around, I managed to shed my ideal reader long enough to get the book done, and it was a joy to write – and funny enough, my agent assumed that I must have a background in food television as my protagonist did because I was so dang authoritative about that universe. I couldn’t believe how easy it had been, finally, to write persuasively and masterfully, and all it took was kicking my ideal reader to the curb! Then, I found myself talking about the book with an old friend, someone really smart whose opinions matter to me, who happens to have background in the food world and the film world. And I knew instantly that I would never willingly let this person see the manuscript unless it had a big fat Pulitzer prize on it. Every insecurity returned in full force. I went back into the manuscript and started pulling out anything I thought could reveal me as an impostor. Did the resulting revision improve the book? Probably. Could it just as easily have destroyed it? Probably. Does your ideal reader hold you close and tell you it’s all right? Do they hold your feet to the flames? Both? Whom do you write for? And why?

December 13, 2010

For three-year-olds, repetition rules. Perhaps for my daughter Gigi it rules more intensely than for other children; I couldn’t say. But for the past three months, no one has been allowed to listen to anything but Sigur Ros in our car. One track at a time, endless repeat, until she’s ready to move on to the next one. Comply, or face an epic tantrum.

Gigi asks a lot of questions. About the band, the songs, the arrangements. She’s startlingly aware of minutiae where I at her age – or older – would have had only a rudimentary sense of tempo, melody, vocal quality. She notices bass lines, notices the different sounds produced when Jón Birgisson strums his guitar or bows it. We talk about what a synthesizer is. We have a repetitive, passionate argument about the vocals – Gigi still periodically insists that Jónsi is a woman. I’ve taught her the term “falsetto.” Showed her Iceland on a map. Played Youtube videos for her (See? He’s a boy!).

She wants to know, “What is he saying?” I tell her I don’t speak Icelandic. Then it comes up that many of Jónsi’s songs aren’t even in Icelandic, but in Vonlenska, a language the singer invented. I thought this would complicate the conversation but Ginger was far readier to believe in a made-up language than she was to accept that a man could sound like Jónsi does.

Back in the 80s I fell ass-over-teakettle for the delirious glossolalia vocals of the Cocteau Twins. Elisabeth Fraser’s vocals were so elastic and ecstatic, and I was sure, though I couldn’t have explained it, that part of that ethereal sound was tied to the liberation from language, that there was something about divorcing sound from meaning that helped one arrive at a purer and more complete meaning, something more intimate, more personal, and at the same time more universal, than words could provide even to one for whom words were meat and drink. In Sigur Ros I immediately sensed the same thing: there was something these guys were able to say because they were not saying anything.

Vonlenska, or “Hopelandic,” Birgisson’s faux-language, is (according to Wikipedia’s entry on the band) “a non-literal language, without fixed syntax, and differs from constructed languages that can be used for communication. It focuses entirely on the sounds of language; lacking grammar, meaning, and even distinct words. Instead, it consists of emotive non-lexical vocables and phonemes; in effect, Vonlenska uses the melodic and rhythmic elements of singing without the conceptual content of language. In this way, it is similar to the use of scat singing in vocal jazz.”

As a poet who happens to moonlight as a jazz singer, this fascinates me on multiple fronts. I love words. Collect them obsessively. Have no idea who I’d be without them. And while I very much dig the tradition of nonsense vocalizing in jazz – from Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s mimicries of horn obbligati to Slim Gaillard’s Vout-a-roonie to the scale-hopping pyrotechnics of Sarah Vaughn or Aretha Franklin – it takes a massive effort for me, personally, to relinquish the security of words, whether on the stage or the page. Scat singing requires a real leap of faith, a willful unmooring from the inherent authority of words and meaning. Words signify things; that is their job. To signify without relying on them can be liberating – but also scary. How someone like Jónsi, or Gaillard, or Fraser, gives him or herself the authority to invent a personal lexicon is beyond me and probably always will be. I wouldn’t have the guts. But when it works – it’s kind of thrilling.

And yet, in our most intense moments -- do we not all abandon words? There is something inherently faulty, inherently inadequate, about words when it comes to expressing our deepest moments of joy, or grief, of shock, of anger. Words cannot do justice to our most passionate feelings. They fail us every time. Perhaps the willful abandon of words does get us closer, sometimes, to the essence of something.

Poetry, if it can be said to be any one thing, might justifiably be thought of as a thought, an idea, a feeling, captured meaningfully in a matrix of words. It seems inextricable from language, from words – though goodness knows many of us have tried to pry our art from the vicegrip of the language it is built from, whether in the playful manner of Lewis Carroll or the battering-ram style favored by some postmodernists. Maybe we occasionally succeed.

Where do meaning and non-meaning meet? Where is the written (spoken, sung) word a scalpel and where is it a sledgehammer? Do we get closer to truth and meaning and the loftiest heights of our art by increasingly precise and skillful disciplining of words or by finding a way to let go of them? Is the presumption of meaning or the presumption that we can free ourselves from meaning the greater artifice?

Ponder this while listening to Sigur Ros's “The Nothing Song.” And get back to me.

December 12, 2010

It’s as if I were lying down in the colonnade, in the Lincoln Memorial, in the forest where every tree is so, in the field where the dragon’s teeth were, where we sowed the wind, Mr. President.

And I was asleep, the fluids seeping out of the corners of my mouth and my eyes, my guts, my unsuspecting guts like an IED just lying there, in the road between the columns, through the impeccable forest of the National Mall, sentinel floodlights, dead angels, the whole thing.

And you were outside roaming around, like Heathcliff, roaming across the moors and streets of Washington, DC, like a flag somebody was carrying through the streets, a furled flag in the darkness flashing between the buildings and then gone, like a flag the last live angel was carrying, running like a thief,

like a lit torch in the bottom of a well, in the fathomless well of the national Dream, fathomless Deep, whirlpool, Moby Dick, the angel running and running like the last whaleboat, crazy malevolence, scarred Beauty, sublime Beast, terrible, beloved.

With you aboard. Only you. It was like that.

-----

"Primary" will appear in Sentence 8, which is due from the printer in a couple weeks, right about the time the 111th Congress ends and the 112th begins. Ann's most recent book, Beloved Idea, came out with Alice James Books in 2007.

The next songis by the great songwriting teamof Rodgers and Hart:“My Heart Stood Still”I first sang this lovely tune oh years agoway back before the war.

Listen to this clown up frontWhich war he saysMaron!

In those days I was singing for the James bandHarry Jamesnow let me tell you that man was a gentlemanthe trumpet voice of sweet swingHe signed me in June 39 to a one-year contract75 bucks a weeka lot of lettuce in those days.

In December I had the chanceto join the Dorsey Band and he released mefrom the contract he didn’t want a dimenot a single solitary dimehe tore it up on the spotunlike some bandleaders I could namewho think they own younobody owns me you hear what I’m saying, Tommy?

OK Charlie key of E-flat“I took one look at youThat’s all I meant to do”And then my heart stood still.

It's a rainy sunday, all the clay tree jewelry I made for the tree out my window is whipping around in the stormy air. Much of it is essentially of pancake dimensions so spins in the wind.

I wrote to you Friday, and I usually write you every two or three weeks lately, so I'll just explain by saying that if this stage of my life has taught me anything it is do it when it's hot, and when it's not, don't even try. Also, I signed off saying that I'd tell you something later, so that left a pregnant pause. (Can we start a reality show called I Didn't Know it was a Pregnant Pause! It could be about the awkwardly officious.)

But what were we talking about? Ah yes. I promised you my poem in answer to C DdA's.

It's become the leap off point for my grand campaign. Campaign title-wise, I've been noodling around with "pro-living." It is a campaign against suicide. I don't mean end of life care suicide, I mean screw-this despair suicide.

As I said here the other day, an old friend killed herself in 2007. I wrote the below poem sometime after that, speaking to myself as much as to others. Then this past Christmas another old friend (also friends with the first) took her own life. I needed to post something to the community we all shared, poetry in America, but I didn't want to just post the poem, because over the two and a half years I'd come to see that people could read a lot of varied things from the poem, which is good for a poem, but not good for an open letter or a manifesto, which is what I wrote instead. Since than, this past year, I've been researching this subject and thinking about what it all means. Oddly, I still believe everything in the poem, but with much more context. Anyway here's my poem.

The No Hemlock Rock

Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself.

Don’t. Eat a donut, be a blown nut.

That is, if you’re going to kill yourself,

stand on a street corner rhyming

seizure with Indonesia, and wreck it with

racket. Allow medical terms.

Rave and fail. Be an absurd living ghost,

if necessary, but don’t kill yourself.

Let your friends know that something has

passed, or be glad they’ve guessed.

But don't kill yourself. If you stay, but are

bat crazy you will batter their hearts

in blooming scores of anguish; but kill

yourself, and hundreds of other people die.

Poison yourself, it poisons the well;

shoot yourself, it cracks the bio-dome.

I will give badges to everyone who’s figured

this out about suicide, and hence

refused it. I am grateful. Stay. Thank

you for staying. Please stay. You

are my hero for staying. I know

about it, and am grateful you stay.

Eat a donut. Rhyme opus with lotus.

Rope is bogus, psychosis. Stay.

Hocus Pocus. Hocus Pocus.

Do not kill yourself. I won’t either.

From this distance I'm just charmed to see how much I equate interesting rhymes with abandonless bliss.

I'm bringing all this up because December gets to be a difficult season for a lot of people and sometimes the blue comes out of the blue. So be prepared for it. Get through it to rue another day. The open letter/ manifesto is easy to find online. Well, I guess I'll link to it, I just fear seeming a barker on something too somber to bark for, but what can I say? I want you to stay. And I want you to have something ready to say if someone you love starts teetering near the neighborhood abyss. Say, We need you desperately.

Love,

Jennifer

ps The Boston Globe asked to publish a (slightly cleaned up) version, here, if you prefer.

pps While waiting to be seen by a professional, fill a notebook with color.

This week we welcome Amy Glynn Greacen as our guest blogger. Amy grew up outside San Francisco. She holds degrees from Mount Holyoke College and Lancaster University, England. Her work has appeared in The New Criterion, Poetry Northwest, The Best American Poetry 2010, and elsewhere. Amy is also a novelist and food writer, and is a five-time alumna of the Sewanee Writers' Conference. She lives in the Bay Area with her family.

In case you've been away, Mitch Sisskind brings back The Stud Duck . . . David Lehman picks up an ASCAP Deems Taylor award (read the comments for Sammy Davis Jr's tribute verse) . . . and Laura Orem puts on the ole feed bag . . . Jeff Oaks concludes a fantastic week of posts, preceded by Erika Meitner's fantastic week of posts, preceded by Jessica Piazza's frenzied Thanksgiving week posts, preceded by . . . what the hell, just scroll through to catch up on all of our guest bloggers . . . you don't have to be Jewish to love latkes! . . . overcome performance anxiety with sex advice from poets . . . stay alive with Jennifer Michael Hecht. . . and Meet the Press with Nin Andrews. Reading around we like the hover project and Culture for Amateurs, start-up sites by our former Peace Corps volunteer friends Leigh Wells, Rob Shore, and Luke Meinzen (sorry that it took me so long to get to this) . . . Have I forgotten anything? Chime in in the comment field below. Oh yes, The Best American Poetry 2010 makes a great holiday gift, get your copy here.

December 11, 2010

<<If you are reading this, you are probably a friend of Dean Young and/or a friend of poetry. And you may have heard that our friend is in a precarious position. Dean needs a heart transplant now. He also needs your assistance now.

Over the past 10 or 15 years, Dean has lived with a degenerative heart condition--congestive heart failure due to idiopathic hypotropic cardiomyopathy. After periods of more-or-less remission, in which his heart was stabilized and improved with the help of medications, the function of his heart has worsened. Now, radically.>>Click here for more details.

I didn't like Allen Ginsberg when I first read him. I didn't get why those long lines and weird language was necessary. It wasn't until I read the "wrong" book of his--the book that nobody else seemed to talk about--that I "got" him. Kaddish had me weeping by the end, and I realized there might be other ways to approach poets than the one that people urge you toward. The other realization was that my initial sense of a poet could be completely wrong. I might not be as smart as I think I am. Of course I have had to learn this lesson many times in my life.

I remember Carl Phillips' work was once so impossible for me to read that I perceived it almost as garble. I turned away from it toward the other thousand poets whose lines were clearer. But his name refused to go away, and it became clear that I had to deal with his work somehow, so I did what I often do: I assigned a book of his for discussion to a class. That would force me, I thought, to come up with a way to read it. I took out the line breaks so I could "simply" read the narrative or argument. Then I tried to put them back in without looking at the original poem. That little useful exercise taught me an enormous amount about the relationship between the sentence and the line. What had seemed like a simple relationship was suddenly changed into a much more sensual one, in which music and sense constantly dance around each other.

Similarly students often say they can't make heads or tails out of his poems. They can't read them, they say. Having gone through it myself long ago, I love this moment. I get to talk about sentences and sentence structure and how meaning can get interrupted and layered and turned toward music.

"Why didn't anyone teach me this stuff?" they complain at some point.

"Someone did," I say. They sigh. They do remember that someone in high school talked about this stuff.

"So we now have a chance to go back and think about it again. Think of it as an opportunity," I say. "This time let's try to think about sentences like artists."

Then we all begin again to read, this time more patiently:

A Kind of Meadow

by Carl Phillips

—shored

by trees at its far ending,

as is the way in moral tales:

whether trees as trees actually,

for their shadow and what

inside of it

hides, threatens, calls to;

or as ever-wavering conscience,

cloaked now, and called Chorus;

or, between these, whatever

falls upon the rippling and measurable,

but none to measure it, thin

fabric of this stands for.

A kind of meadow, and then

trees—many, assembled, a wood

therefore. Through the wood

the worn

path, emblematic of Much

Trespass: Halt. Who goes there?

A kind of meadow, where it ends

begin trees, from whose twinning

of late light and the already underway

darkness you were expecting perhaps

the stag to step forward, to make

of its twelve-pointed antlers

the branching foreground to a backdrop

all branches;

or you wanted the usual

bird to break cover at that angle

at which wings catch entirely

what light’s left,

so that for once the bird isn’t miracle

at all, but the simplicity of patience

and a good hand assembling: first

the thin bones, now in careful

rows the feathers, like fretwork,

now the brush, for the laying-on

of sheen.... As is always the way,

you tell yourself, in

poems—Yes, always,

until you have gone there,

and gone there, “into the

field,” vowing Only until

there’s nothing more

I want—thinking it, wrongly,

a thing attainable, any real end

to wanting, and that it is close, and that

it is likely, how will you not

this time catch hold of it: flashing,

flesh at once

lit and lightless, a way

out, the one dappled way, back—

Thanks to Stacey and David for asking me to guest blog this week. It's been a blast.

So she says Princess Leia's pop gave up the ghost.I said that's a hell of a way to describe Eddie Fisher.She said I never heard of Eddie Fisher.Did you know he had a national television show sponsored by Coke?He was for the spokesman for Coke.I get it, she said, but what was the big deal?Well, he could sing. This was back in the early 1950s.Name one of his songs.OK. O My Papa.Never heard of it. Tell me about the scandals.He left America's sweetheart Debbie Reynolds for America's top femme fatale, Liz Taylor of the violet eyes.Thaink of it like this: he was Brad Pitt and he left Jennifer Niston for Angelina Jolie.I get it now, she said. Say have you noticed that Liz Taylor narrates the Montgomery Clift puff piece on TCM and Paul Newman narrates the one about her? Clubby set.I heard he also married Connie Stevens. Eddie Fisher, I mean.Carrie Fisher's Papa?I hear he wrote two autobiographies about getting laid.Actually, he sounds like a really fun guy from a different era.

NA: I read that NYQ Books only publishes books by poets who have published in The New York Quarterly magazine. How does that work? Do you solicit manuscripts from these poets after they have published in the journal?

RH: We do not solicit work. We rely on two very simple concepts to select manuscripts. The first is prior acceptance for publication in the magazine. Prior acceptance gives us a good starting point for manuscripts as the editorial vetting is already done, and done at no cost to the author such as in a contest scenario. The second concept is that we also do not accept unsolicited manuscripts—an invitation must be extended. The invitation gives us a modicum of control over how many books we consider at any given time, and most importantly it allows us to better coordinate the books we are looking for which keeps the press as eclectic as the magazine. The vetting and the invitation process allow us a starting point of already knowing the author and their work.

NA: Do you then solicit poets to submit to the New York Quarterly? Or are you, as I would imagine, already overwhelmed with submissions?

RH: We work very hard to keep the selection of poems for the magazine to just that, the poem for the poem’s sake for the sake of the magazine. The way that a poet begins to get noticed for inclusion in the books is when we start accepting repeated submissions from them, then we say to ourselves, maybe we should just do a book of their work. I have found so far that having the books for that added venue is a very nice option because some people I just want to publish more of their work than publication in the magazine will allow.

NA: I also have read that the NYQ Books is a new press. How long has NYQ Books been in existence? Why was the press started? What were some of the first books you published?

RH: The concept of NYQ Books has been around since the magazine began in 1969. It was something that the founding editor, William Packard, told me was always a dream of his. Then after his death, we found several proposals for an NYQ Books in the records that had been drafted by him. The name, NYQ Books, comes from Bill. After much research and consideration and dreaming on my own part, we began the press June of 2009 in celebration of NYQ’s 40th anniversary.

We made the decision to start the press in order to provide a venue for book publication for many of our poets who have been overlooked by the more mainstream presses. We put these books into publication right alongside more established poets and are not concerned about sales statistics. To accomplish this goal, we began our idea with two basic premises.

The first premise was to say to ourselves, “Poetry doesn’t sell.” And while this statement sounds self-defeating and is open to all sorts of debate and sounds like a cry of desperate mediocrity, there is an element of truth to it which immediately removes any grand expectations that we will sell thousands of copies of each book we publish. By removing this expectation, we can publish and keep in print books that don’t immediately sell right alongside books that do, and we are hoping that eventually the press will work as a single organism, some books supporting the others—but keeping all in print.

The second premise which dovetails with the first is to publish what we want and what fits the scheme of the press as a whole, to base our decisions on the poetry itself and eclecticism of the press rather than on how well we think a book will sell or what book won a contest.

Many of the principles of the press, such as not worrying about the sales potential, reducing the overhead and risk, and maintaining the books in print have been made possible by print on demand technology which was not available in Bill’s time. As well, print on demand is more eco-friendly.

NA: What kinds of books are you most interested in reading and publishing?

RH: The goal of the magazine has always been to present anything, any style, any school, any genre of poetry to our readers—to never limit what we consider or present. And so it is with the press. I am very pleased that we have what I would consider academic type poets right alongside poets such as the experimental poet Richard Kostelanetz or a cab driver or a high school teacher. We are looking to mix it up and be known for our eclecticism. I don’t want to be known for any particular style of poetry. I want readers to identify with the NYQ Books brand when they read something from a poet that they liked, and will then turn around because of that brand and try something else, something new.

NA: How many books do you publish each year?

RH: With the publication of Adam Hughes’ Petrichor on December 1, 2010, we will have 28 books in print. That is 28 books in the 18 months since June 1, 2009—I am very proud of that fact. Our plan was to produce as many books as we possibly could right up front—to “front load” the program, to allow books to build off of the others and establish a broad, eclectic base. We need to slow that number down at this point, and I am thinking right now that we will probably settle, speaking practically, into a number like 14 a year—but we probably will not stick to that too closely since there are so many books we want to publish, given the funding and the time.

NA: What are some of the proudest moments for the press so far? Could you provide some links to reviews, blogs, awards, etc. featuring NYQ Books.

RH: It sounds hokey, I know, but the proudest moment for me personally was when that first book proof was delivered. And I am privileged to relive that experience with each and every book that we produce. To hold it, smell it, read it cover to cover after putting it together is truly something amazing. Every book is that special to me, because each one is unique and can only do what it does in the world for the word. That is what this is all about, putting the work of poets into the hands of readers. I am also very proud of maintaining the same eclecticism as we have in the magazine. I am also rather proud of the website, which I built myself. It is simple and clean and touts an author section where each author can log in and find their sales and royalties for the previous months. The authors can update information about readings, and we also have “Reviews and News” where there are links to all things pertinent to a book including awards and reviews.

NA: It’s always hard, it seems to me, to get poetry into the hands of readers. Do you have any secret recipes for doing just that? Any magic for distributing your books?

RH: Our business plan is “keep it simple.” To this end we actually limit distribution channels rather than having more. This seems counter-intuitive, but by limiting the channels, we are also limiting risk, investment, and time expenditure. If we keep those things in check, then we can produce more books, and concentrate on getting the books out to readers rather than all of those not-fun-things like inventory, sales tax, accounting, fulfillment of orders, etc. To this end we are somewhat unique in that we do not sell the books directly—no storage, no inventory, no sales tax, no shipping—let the distributors handle all of that. In addition to Small Press Dsitribution, we also have several agreements with Ingram to get the books out to a worldwide market.

NA: What is the best place for a reader to find NYQ Books?

RH: The best place is at our website, http://www.nyqbooks.org. All of our in-print and forthcoming books are listed along with links to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powells, and Small Press Distribution, as well as the international Amazon sites. As I said above, we do not sell directly to the reader. This reduces the risk we take on inventory, removes a very complicated accounting stream that would involve sales taxes, fulfillment, etc. Some of our books get placed into bookstores that are relevant to the author, but these vary by book and will be the topic of a new page linked to the book’s page on our website in the near future. We would also like very much to begin a relationship with independent bookstores in various major cities who would be known for carrying all of the books in the series, but this has been slow to start mainly because of the time commitment on our end to start it. I hope this is coming down the road even if it is just a few around the country.

Raymond P. Hammond is a poet and critic who, originally from Virginia, now resides in Brooklyn and works at the Statue of Liberty National Monument as a law enforcement officer half of the week and as editor-in-chief of The New York Quarterly the other half. He holds an MA from New York University where most of his classes were intense studies of poetics with William Packard at the Chelsea Gallery Diner over a hamburger. He has two books: an old chapbook of poetry, Glacial Reasoning, and a new book of criticism, Poetic Amusement.

Here's David with Julie Flanders, one of the four judges who singled out his book for recognition:

There were cocktails, there were hors d'oeuvres, there was music. As the guests arrived, pianist Richard Miller tickled the ivories of Harold Arlen's piano, which resides in the ASCAP gallery. He played "When a Woman Loves a Man" because he knew it was one of David's favorites. Here's David with Arlen's piano:And here's David with Thelonius Monk III, on hand to pick up Robin D. G. Kelley's award for the biography of his father, the one and only Thelonius Monk:

My father has been dead for ten years today. I woke up in the dark hotel to a phone call: a nurse saying, “Your father’s condition has changed.” I’d spent the last three days with his second wife watching him die, so I knew what she really meant by “changed.”

"Changed, changed utterly,” I hear echoing in my head now, but that morning there was only a kind of exhausted silence. It had been hard work to sit with a dying man, someone I had such complicated feelings about, and his wife who kept assuring me that I was her son now too. That morning all I knew is that I had to find my clothes and get into them, get into the truck, drive across town to the hospital, and then do whatever was next. As I drove past the McDonalds and Burger Kings, past the little dull plazas of my childhood, past the big, 24 hour Wegmans, a voice on the radio said it was Emily Dickinson’s birthday.

And because I knew it, I recited “Because I could not Stop for Death”

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

We slowly drove –He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess – in the Ring –

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –

We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –

The Dews drew quivering and chill –

For only Gossamer, my Gown –

My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground –

The Roof was scarcely visible –

The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses' Heads

Were toward Eternity –

Everything in it rang and glittered with new, personal resonance. I didn’t cry then; that only happened months after the funeral. But the poem kept me company there as I silently drove toward the body that used to be my awful, angry, complicated father. The weirdness of being in my little truck driving through the place where I’d grown up, the bizarre look everything had, as strange as “Gazing Grain,” the strange way time in the last three days had been stretched, it was all there in the poem.

Part of my job is to set up big, public readings, but I hope the real work goes on off-stage, in the cramped rusting quiet of a student driving back home maybe, when a poem or sentence refuses to be forgotten, when the reader finds him or herself saying the words over and over again for the pleasure and the pain they bring.

There are a lot of ways to tell a story and one way is that sometime after my friend SH took her life I was teaching Elizabeth Bishop’s Collected Poems in the MFA Program at the New School and happened upon Bishop’s translations of the Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s great poem, “Don’t kill yourself.” It made my brows raise because I hadn’t quite ever thought of just saying, “Don’t kill yourself,” and furthermore, saying it twice. Stacey recently posted it on this site, but here it is in full again.

Don’t Kill Yourself

Carlos, keep calm, love

is what you’re seeing now;

today a kiss, tomorrow no kiss,

day after day tomorrow’s Sunday

and nobody knows what will happen

Monday.

It’s useless to resist

or to commit suicide.

Don’t kill yourself. Don’t kill yourself!

Keep all of yourself for the nuptials

coming nobody knows when,

that is, if they ever come.

Love, Carlos, tellurian,

spent the night with you,

and now your insides are raising

an ineffable racket,

prayers,

victrolas,

saints crossing themselves,

ads for better soap,

a racket of which nobody

knows the why or wherefore.

In the meantime, you go on your way

vertical, melancholy.

You’re the palm tree, you’re the cry

nobody heard in the theatre

and all the lights went out.

Love in the dark, no, love

in the daylight, is always sad,

sad, Carlos, my boy,

but tell it to nobody,

nobody knows nor shall know.

Is that a great poem or what? The first time I read it I loved the lines that I loved but I was sorry it said what it says instead of what I wanted it to say.

Drummond de Andrade will never be considered a truly great poet because his last name is too long and hard to remember, but he did have a way with words. He’s a Brazillian poet, lived from 1902 to 1987 and here, in this poem, he is in what Liz Lemon on 30 Rock would call a Relationship Lizastrophe, a heart-storm tizzy having had an actual encounter with another human creature (of which there are nearly 7 billion, but all of them oddly alone). Can I translate this poem to prose for us? It says:

Carlos, me, stop freaking out. You’ve been kissed. Maybe you’ll get another kiss tomorrow, maybe not, ad infinitum. Nothing can be done about this exciting series of possibilities. The only way to stop it would be to kill yourself, so do not do that. Just stay and hope for more kisses, even sex.

You are freaking out because you have spent the night feeling enraptured by love, a common thing in the world. (The word “tellurian” just means earth-thing, thing of the earth.) Your insides are going nuts with panic and emotion, also pretty normal. The feelings and hormones and thoughts going on my head right now are a cacophony, like a symphony of prayers, old record players, Catholic signs and wonders, commercials for soap and better living. There’s no way to make any sense of this racket inside.

Meanwhile you are walking around town, looking normal but with such a banged up heart that you are identifying with every passing tree. When someone lets out one of those moans that might be anything, might just be the sigh of sitting down, it’s such a relief. “Oh!” someone cries out and you agree. “Oh,” me too. And the lights go out in the theater. Me too.

Carlos is alone and says to himself that love, especially in the light of day, is always sad, and it is true, but it is not all that is true, and he knows it, calling himself a boy to hint that someone too young to know is trying to know, while nearby, also inside the poet, is the sublime and graceful knowing. See what he says, in the last lines? “tell it to nobody, nobody knows nor shall know.” He’s closing the poem there, tucking his scarf into his overcoat. But also he’s counseling himself to keep the crazy hidden, keep the despair hidden, he says, "Hide it" but he’s telling us.

He knows it's safer to keep it to himself, but he still manages to get it on paper and hand it out across the century to me, and I can take it and I can say thank you Carlos Drummond de A…. I wish I could remember your name. I get stuck on the Andrade part.

Now friends, what I wanted the poem to say was less, “Self, don’t flee from feeling, even though it is so scary that you almost feel like running off a ledge,” and more, “Friends, selves, countrymen of the realms of gold, sisters of outrageous despair, Don’t kill yourselves.”

I wanted to say: We have to talk to each other. We broken. We need to keep drinking tea or wine and tell each other the one thing we don’t have to trance out to hear: I was there. It sucked. It was insane, the things I said to myself to stay sane. You too? Got a hot hot brain from coping too long all up in your head alone? Don’t kill yourself. Come over and drink coffee or beer with us and tell us. The people who do not ever feel this way pity us. Maybe you don’t want to be pitied, but I’m ready to accept that being someone who has a hard time feeling okay is often awful, as awful as other awful things, and that’s how it is for me, so pity away, ye normals, and freaks come sit by me.

That’s not what I ended up writing in my poem. But I’ll tell you more about that later.

Fear of opening one’s eyes.Fear of glaring light.Of black sand, the stepping onto.Fear of babies’ soft heads, abandoned shoes.Of open mouths, that bees will hive there.Fear of flowers that refuse to be named.Of cut hair fallen to the floor.Of floors.Of tear-sipping moths, the ones that come at night.Fear of locusts, the roar.The slow will of animals.Fear of shriveled fruit.Of reaching one’s hand into riverWhich is the soul’s digression. Fear of snake children, their translucence.Of yellow stains on the ceiling.Of ceilings.Of cooking young goat in its mother’s milk.Fear of passing unnoticed. Also Fear of being stared at in the street.Of combustion, especially the body’s.Fear of forgetting to breathe.Of the bird in your chest, that it ceaseOr fly from your mouth into radiance.